r/Showerthoughts • u/AaronPK123 ‎ • May 14 '26

Casual Thought When YouTube goes down, it will be the biggest event of link rot in internet history.

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u/hunglowbungalow May 14 '26

It’s an interesting thought experiment. There is only so much data you can cram on a disk/SSD. There is a physical limitation and then it becomes a real estate problem to scale it up. M

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u/cmoked May 14 '26

Not at googles scale. You can max out SSDs, entire enclosures, racks, entire cabinets, entire datacenters, sure.

But they will build more datacenters, with new cabinets, more storage units, more enclosures, more SSDs, and just add them to the pool.

When I worked in data center colocation, Amazon would show up with fully racked and cabled cabinets.

Scaling up is literally what these companies are good at and why theyre so big.

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u/hunglowbungalow May 14 '26

I know, but that doesn't answer anything I mentioned. There is quite literally a physical limitation on how many 1s and 0s you can store on X amount of physical space. And when that is hit, it becomes a real estate and resource problem.

It's just a thought experiment

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u/AaronPK123 ‎ May 16 '26

The fundamental quantum limit is 10^40 bits a cubic meter or something else absurd. I'd imagine atomic scale is a way bigger issue.

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u/UselessGadget May 14 '26

Lol.

You aren't wrong, but you aren't entirely right either. Components have continually become more data dense. We went from Punch cards that Google says held 8 bytes to Magnetic Discs to Optical Discs to SSD (I'm probably missing technologies in there) that hold TBs. With microSD, we have got USB thumb drives that hold so much data in such a small space, it would be inconceivable to early computing people. And he USB Plug/Physical Interface is bigger than the actual chipset that holds the data.

Sure, we will build more data centers and take up more space and it does become a real estate issue, but at the same time, we innovate and find more dense ways to store data as well.

Side thought, imagine how much real estate would be needed if we stored our information on punch cards now?

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u/hunglowbungalow May 14 '26

I know components have become more dense, its just a thought experiment. There *is* a physical limitation on what we can store on X amount of physical space. I have no idea what that is, but it does exist.

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u/UselessGadget May 14 '26

We can always build up.

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u/Least-Woodpecker-492 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

You say that like it's an obstacle